"Hackers" delete sections of the RIAA website
By Jonathan Schlaffer
Many consumers are calling for the downfall, removal or just the simple conversion of the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) into a non-existent entity, for the time being, we will just have to make do with the “downfall” of the RIAA’s website.
The RIAA has been suing everyone and their grandmother for copyright infringement for one reason or another, even people without computers have been sued. In fact, it’s difficult to think of anyone who actually likes the RIAA these days, even some artists are jumping ship.
It turns out that Reddit users, not surprisingly, disagree with the RIAA so much so that a post claims to perform a slow SQL injection on the RIAA’s server which, in turn, makes the website run very slowly. This type of attack could eventually take down a website.
Let’s assume this happened because it certainly appears that it did. At some point, someone took it upon themselves to find a way in to the RIAA database and delete a good deal of it.
TorrentFreak is speculating as to what actually happened but it looks like the RIAA doesn’t have enough (or any?) programmers to deal with the situation as many of the pages are still missing content as of this post.
If the RIAA wants to continue spreading its “message” it had better restore whatever backups it has, sooner rather than later. That is, if backups were in its budget seeing as how 99% of its staff seem to be lawyer types.
Below, we have a few images of what the website looked like without its content.
In fact, the only sidebar link that works is the News Room but even then, the links that appear in that section are dead or go to missing pages.
There are even reports that a link to ThePirateBay was present in one of the pages but I have yet to see or replicate that particular issue.
If the RIAA finds their way to fixing its website, it had better plug the vulnerability that allowed this to happen in the first place because if it doesn’t, this will probably happen more often and frequently because it is now one of the most detested organizations in recent history.
[UPDATE:] Shortly after this post was completed, the RIAA seems to have repaired the website but who knows, it may still be vulnerable to future attacks. It is, however, running somewhat slowly.
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on Sunday, January 20th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
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February 1st, 2008
Thanks for sharing